This blog exists purely as a place for me to dump random links and thoughts I have rather than emailing them to my friends. It'll have large amounts of inside jokes. Also there will probably be times when I write "you" or refer to an email. Just pretend that you are reading an email to you. If you don't know me you likely won't find anything here interesting. If you do know me you also will not find anything here interesting.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

One way you might design a CPU is to have the CPU do all of the work for
one instruction, then move on to the next instruction, do all of the
work for the next instruction, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with
this; a lot of older CPUs did this, and some modern very low-cost CPUs
still do this. But if you want to make a faster CPU, you might make a
CPU that works like an assembly line. That is, you break the CPU up into
two parts, so that half the CPU can do the “front half” of the work for
an instruction while half the CPU works on the “back half” of the work
for an instruction, like an assembly line. This is typically called a
pipelined CPU.